A welcome take on the alien genre
The new science-fiction/horror thriller
Life has an alien contact storyline that obviously owes much to the Alien franchise, and has the disadvantage of coming out two months before Alien: Covenant (produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Dennis Villeneuve) hits the screens. But directed by Swede Daniel Espinosa (of Child 44) and with a screenplay from the team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (whose credits include
Zombieland and Deadpool), I still harbored high expectations for the film. Plus, it has a strong cast led by Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson.
For the first half of the film, we are given something truly novel and interesting — a new take on the genre, where the suspense, horror and chills mesh beautifully with the Gravity-type human drama. We have a six-man team working on a space station orbiting Earth, tasked to intercept a capsule coming from Mars, carrying what could be the first discovered alien life form, a single cell organism. From the first five-minute single take which allows us to both meet the cast and appreciate the lay-out of the station, we feel thrust into a unique “world” that holds much promise for recharging the first contact genre. And when the alien life form is introduced, its design and development brings something refreshing to the table. Its being “awakened” and rapid maturity are both gripping (literally!) and exciting. Add the element at the stage of how the story has a healthy and surprising disrespect for star status when it comes to meting out the sequence of cast member deaths, and I felt this was going to be an exciting ride. The character of the Japanese crew member (Hiroyuki Sanada) is one of the better fleshed-out ones; but the fact that the others aren’t better developed leads to one of the weaknesses of the film’s second act.
As this second half commences, we revert to formula, merely waiting for the next crew member to act out his or her heroic death. And the promise of the alien’s initial design, “all muscle, all brain, all eye,” succumbs to a form derivative of Alien and other films of the genre. The last two surviving crew members aren’t even the ones we were asked to invest much empathy with, and so we’re reduced to blithely watching the proceedings from a distance.
Shame, as the first half of the film is really good. Given the pedigree of the writers, was also looking for the shafts of humor or black comedy that made Zombieland and Deadpool such genre-bending excursions.